The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

by The New Yorker Magazine

  But during those moments when I was mourning myself so sincerely my wife was not sharing the full pathos of the situation. She was standing in the courtyard watching my progress and, as she has since confessed, laughing helplessly. She insists that she couldn’t successfully worry about me, because the fire escape is broad, solid enough to support a battalion, and pitched no steeper than an ordinary staircase. She says that the sight of me inching backward down this substantial stairway, spread-eagled, holding on to both railings for dear life, and feeling timorously for each step with my foot, was one of the funniest performances she has ever seen.

  Be that as it may, I was immensely relieved when, at last, I found that I had worked my way down to the cat’s level. I looked forward hopefully to winding up the extravaganza shortly and going about my normal business. Reaching toward the trembling cat, I crooned, “There, there, kitty. Everything’s going to be all right,” to which the cat responded in a way familiar to would-be cat rescuers ever since cats first domesticated unwary mankind. With rescue at hand, the cat became transformed. It ceased to shiver and wail. It stretched, yawned, rose languorously to its feet, blinked once or twice at me, as if to show surprise but no great interest at seeing me there, eyed my importunate fingers with light disdain, and then, the window beside her being open a few inches, slid gracefully into Apartment 13-E. There, on what I now saw was the bathroom floor, she settled down to licking delicately at the handsome streak of white fur on her sleek gray chest.

  Deeply regretting that the apartment’s tenants had not seen fit to close their windows before they went on vacation, I pushed the window up and leaned over the sill, murmuring such blandishments as “Come please, kitty, goddammit.”

  The cat didn’t even bother to look at me. I threw one leg over the sill and made a quick grab at her. She drew back out of reach. I brought the other leg over and rushed at her. That was a mistake. She darted out of the room. I hesitated a moment, then—not knowing what better to do—dashed after her, finding myself in a bedroom, where I caught a glimpse of the cat’s tail whisking out through a door on the far side. That door, I discovered, opened into the foyer of the apartment. The living room was on one side of it and the dining room on the other. All the furniture in both rooms was covered with sheets and dropcloths. The cat was not to be seen.

  I paused in the foyer, feeling increasingly uneasy about having let myself be lured into a strange apartment, and wondering what to do now. As I stood there, to my consternation I saw the front door slowly open. A man and a woman came through it. They were talking earnestly, and they obviously belonged there. They could only be the apartment’s tenants, returned, at this moment, of all moments, from their vacation.

  A small eternity—several seconds, perhaps—passed before they noticed me. If I had been able to move, I would have fled back through the bedroom and out the bathroom window, braving all the perils of the fire escape, but I could not stir. When, at last, they became aware of me, they merely stared at me, immobilized, and said nothing. “I live in Apartment 8-E,” I said, trying for a light conversational tone, “and I’m trying to find our cat.”

  “Cat?” the man said. He was a large man with rumpled blond hair and a harassed expression.

  “It’s here somewhere,” I said. “It must have crawled under the couch. I know it’s here.”

  The man had a telegram in his hand, and its contents must have been on his mind, preventing him from adjusting at once to the presence in his apartment of a stranger who claimed to be hunting a cat. He kept looking from the telegram to me, and then, still speechless, blankly about him. Here, things become somewhat blurred for me. Suddenly the apartment was full of people—mostly women, one of them my wife—rushing about, poking under the furniture, and calling, “Here, kitty, kitty!”

  Having seen the cat and me vanish into 13-E, my wife had scooped up a posse in the courtyard and led it upstairs. When the posse arrived at the apartment, the tenants had dazedly invited them in to help in the search. And now the women were all over the place, like a pack of hounds running down a fox. The harassed blond man and his wife stood in the middle of it all, trying to consult about the telegram. Every few minutes, the man would mop his brow, run distractedly about, adding his own cry of “Kitty, kitty!” to those of the pack, and then, circling back to his wife, resume his efforts to cope with whatever urgent matter the telegram had announced. I decided that I had better get out of there, before hysteria set in, and murmuring to no one in particular, “I guess there’s nothing more that I can do,” stole away and went shakily to my office.

  I didn’t get much work done the rest of that day, but I did spend a good deal of time thinking how simple and beautiful life could be anywhere but in Manhattan. Late in the morning, I received a report from my wife, by telephone, that the cat had eventually been found behind the stove of 13-E. And when I got home that evening, I felt that surely, after the day’s experience, my wife would be ready to discuss tolerantly the idea of moving to the suburbs.

  To my surprise, I discovered that she was nothing of the sort. She seemed, instead, quite inspired by the events of the morning. She kept saying how helpful everybody had been, even the mailman. That was the great thing about Manhattan, she said—that people could be helpful there without having to be perpetual friends. “It’s not like Greenwich or Larchmont,” she said, pronouncing these names with repulsion. “Or any of those other cozy places. Why, the people who helped us today probably won’t even say hello if they meet us in the elevator tomorrow.” With a laugh, she added, “By the way, the tenants in 13-E said they never for a moment thought you were a burglar. They thought you must be a building inspector, or something. I guess they thought that because you were wearing a suit.”

  Not to be deflected, I said, “You have to admit this couldn’t even have happened in Larchmont.”

  My wife gazed at me with real surprise. “Why!” she said. “If you’d broken into the house of one of those property-conscious Larchmont people the way you did into 13-E, you wouldn’t have got off so easily, I can tell you. Larchmont isn’t Manhattan. They’ve all got guns in those places. They’d have shot you dead.”

  | 1958 |

  (illustration credit 12.4)

  (illustration credit 12.5)

  CAT GODDESSES

  A perverse habit of cat goddesses—

  Even the blackest of them, black as coals

  Save for a new moon blazing on each breast,

  With coral tongues and beryl eyes like lamps,

  Long-leggèd, pacing three by three in nines—

  This obstinate habit is to yield themselves,

  In verisimilar love ecstasies,

  To tatter-eared and slinking alley toms

  No less below the common run of cats

  Than they above it—which they do for spite,

  To provoke jealousy, not the least abashed

  By such gross-headed, rabbit-colored litters

  As soon they will be happy to desert.

  —ROBERT GRAVES | 1953 |

  (illustration credit p03.1)

  TIGER IN THE SNOW

  * * *

  PETER MATTHIESSEN

  In early April of 1996, I went to the zoo in Indianapolis to pay my respects to a young Amur tiger, which I found stretched gracefully on a sunny ledge, the highest and most isolated point in an outside enclosure she shares with two other Amur tigers, another young female and an adult male. She peered at me—or, rather, past me, in the cat’s indifferent manner—through the slanted ellipses of gold-amber eyes. Unlike her companions—and unlike most zoo tigers—this beautiful creature was born in the wild, and, as it happened, I had recently returned from southeastern Siberia, where I had visited the alder wood on a snowy ridge on which she had been captured four years earlier, as an unweaned, orphaned cub.

  According to her keepers, the young tigress remains rather shy and apprehensive around strangers, owing to the traumatic circumstances surrounding her capture; a young zoo-b
red tigress, who is more gregarious, was placed in her enclosure as a “surrogate sibling,” to help acclimate her to captivity and calm her down. The Siberian tigress is beautiful and healthy, at about two hundred and fifty pounds, and is exceptionally valuable because of her genes, which promise a welcome infusion of new blood into captive-tiger-breeding programs all over the country. This month, she is scheduled to be bred with a genetically suitable male from the Minnesota Zoo—one whose genes are not already widespread in American zoo populations. Her cubs would be exponentially more valuable in maintaining the small tiger population in the wild, but that is not her story.

  The remote and beautiful Primorski Krai, or Maritime Province, in eastern Siberia, is best known to the outside world through an enchanting book called Dersu the Trapper (the source of the fine 1975 Kurosawa film Dersu Uzala), which filled me with yearning to travel to that remote region ever since I first read it, back in the sixties. Its author, V. K. Arseniev, was a young Russian Army geographer, ethnographer, and naturalist who between 1902 and 1907 made three expeditions on horse and on foot to map the still unknown Maritime Province; his guide was Dersu, a local hunter, who had survived a terrible mauling by a tiger. Known to the local Chinese as Hu Lin, the King, and to the Tungus tribes as Amba, Protector of the Forest, the tiger pervades Arseniev’s accounts. To indigenous people such as Dersu, it was the very spirit of the great Old World forest known as the taiga.

  In late June of 1992, I made my first visit to Primorski Krai, which curves south along the Sea of Japan like a great claw to its borders with northeastern China and North Korea. My destination was the Sikhote-Alin International Biosphere Reserve, the largest wildlife sanctuary in the Far East, consisting of a thousand three hundred and fifty square miles of forested mountains, clear silver torrents, and unbroken coast. Here the brown bear and lynx, wolf and salmon of the north share their range with the tiger and leopard and subtropical flycatchers in a remarkable faunal region, unlike any other wilderness on earth.

  WINTER QUARTERS

  Since the advent of the cold weather, a large, handsome, and extremely dirty cat has taken up residence in a parking lot on East Thirty-sixth Street. When a car arrives, it hops onto the hood, nestles there until the radiator cools off, then transfers to a newer and warmer arrival.

  | 1951 |

  The Sikhote-Alin Mountains are the last stronghold of Panthera tigris altaica, the so-called Siberian, or Manchurian, tiger, which as recently as the last century was common not only in Siberia but throughout northeastern China and the Korean Peninsula, and ranged west perhaps as far as Mongolia and Lake Baikal. Yet the heart of the tiger’s range has always been the watershed of the mighty Amur River and its main tributary, the Ussuri, which form the eastern boundary of Russia and China. Known more precisely as the Amur tiger, it resembles the Indian, or Bengal, race in its general aspect, but there is more white in the striking patterns of the head and also on the underbelly, and the flame color is less intense—less fire orange than old gold. Although only slightly taller, the Amur race in its longhaired winter coat appears more massive than the Bengal—the only one of the five surviving tiger races or subspecies which compares to it in size—and captive males have approached a weight of a thousand pounds.

  This largest of the earth’s great cats is already effectively extinct in China and the Koreas, and the few hundred surviving in Russia were in mortal danger, when, in 1989, Russian tiger authorities and American wildlife biologists first discussed an international research program to study the ecology and range and habitat requirements of P. t. altaica as the basis for a comprehensive plan that would try to save it. In January of 1992, the Siberian Tiger Project was set up at Terney, a fishing port about two hundred miles northeast of Vladivostok, which is surrounded by the Sikhote-Alin Reserve. The American co-directors of the project, Dr. Maurice Hornocker and Dr. Howard Quigley, of the Hornocker Wildlife Institute, which is affiliated with the University of Idaho, were pioneers in the use of radio telemetry to conduct field studies of cougars and jaguars: after immobilizing the animal with drugs by means of a rifle-fired dart, they would take its measurements and blood samples, then fit it with a radio collar that permitted scientists to monitor the animal’s movements and arrive at a better understanding of its ecology and range.

  I was eager to observe field operations, but, as it happened, I arrived two days too late to witness the capture and release of a large tigress nicknamed Lena, only the second study animal caught since the project had begun. At Terney, Hornocker, a rangy, well-weathered wildlife biologist in his early sixties, and a foremost authority on the great cats, introduced me to three of his associates: a husky young American, Dr. Dale Miquelle, and two of their Russian colleagues—Igor Nikolaiev and Evgeny Smirnov—who, before the arrival of radio telemetry, had done most of their extensive research by tracking the animals on foot in winter. The researchers told me that Lena’s signals were still coming from a wooded drainage area known as the Kunalaika in the southern part of the reserve, very close to the site of her capture two days earlier. Though full recovery from the immobilization drug might take two or three days, they were concerned that Lena had not recovered faster and wandered farther.

  The next day, in the hope of monitoring the tiger’s signals more precisely, we trekked into the forest, following a creek upstream for several miles through hardwood taiga of oak and birch, cottonwood and maple, poplar, ash, and elm, with scattered pines. On a dim old trail, all but closed by ferns, were big, raw pugmarks, or footprints. Perhaps these had been made by Lena, perhaps not. Farther on were deep-scratched trees where a tiger had sharpened its claws. Eventually, we arrived at the site where Lena had been snared—a large cottonwood where the ground was torn up all around and a strong sapling as thick as a man’s arm had been snapped off clean. Lena’s captors spoke with quiet awe of the terrible roars and lunging, the ferocity, with which this young female had made three swift charges on the cable of her snare before Hornocker and Nikolaiev were able to tranquillize her with two rifle-fired darts. Since then, Lena had moved less than a mile upstream. Using some rough triangulation to fix her precise location, we paused at a point estimated by Hornocker to be approximately a hundred yards from the tiger. Over the receiver came more rapid beepings, indicating that Lena was up and moving and had us located, too. She did not roar, but nobody believed that she was in a good temper. I envisioned her with her head raised and alert, her small, round white-spotted ears twitching in the greenish sunlight. In the fragmented sun shafts of the woodland, the head would be camouflaged by bold black calligraphic lines inscribed on frost-bright brows and beard and ruff, in a beautiful and terrifying mask of snow and fire.

  In Dersu the Trapper Arseniev translates an inscription he had found in a Chinese joss house in Primorski Krai: “To the Lord Tiger who dwelleth in the Forest and the Mountains. In ancient days … he saved the state. Today his Spirit brings happiness to man.” Considering the menace of the tiger, I had originally found the word “happiness” rather curious. But on that day in the Kunalaika forest while Lena observed us from her place of hiding I felt a kindled exaltation very close to what the poet Elizabeth Bishop felt when confronted with the enigma of a roadside moose:

  Why, why do we feel

  (we all feel) this sweet

  sensation of joy?

  In late summer, Dr. Hornocker wrote me to say that Lena had resumed hunting in a normal manner. Also, a third female had been snared and collared, and in October, in the northern part of the Sikhote-Alin, a fourth female and two half-grown cubs were caught, making six “marked” animals all together. More exciting still was a discovery in the next month that Lena had produced a litter of four cubs. Elated, Hornocker suggested that I pay a return visit to Primorski Krai in winter, when I might hope to see a tiger in the snow. But in November he sent the terrible news that Dale Miquelle had found Lena’s radio collar slashed from her neck and tossed into the snow. Apparently, she had been killed by poachers on a road edge.
Of her cubs there was no sign whatsoever.

  “Honey, I’m home!” (illustration credit 13.2)

  Because Lena had been the first “marked” animal to produce a litter, and was therefore of critical importance to many aspects of the tiger study, her loss was devastating. The heartbroken and enraged Miquelle had rushed back to Terney to report what had happened. Evgeny Smirnov and the reserve director, Anatoli Astafiev, accompanied by a forest guard and a police officer, returned with him to investigate the poaching site. While they were standing on the road, Smirnov glimpsed a movement in the bushes, and a moment later four tiger cubs were seen floundering uphill through the snow and alders. Though Miquelle tore off in pursuit, he was unable to catch them, yet it was clear that the unweaned and famished cubs, still awaiting their mother after a week or more, had kept circling back toward the killing place. (Though only a few months old, they were already the size of bobcats.) Realizing that they would not stray far, the men had returned to Terney and organized a capture party.